Dagar

Dunno how well the SMG does it right now, but maybe alternatively you could look into it suppressing a bit more. A CQ high reflex one handed suppression weapon would be pretty cool to have. Of course it should not suppress as reliably as the LMGs or miniguns do.

Just out of curiosity, did you want that for a possible mod of Xen2nauts? Or for something else?

Yeah, I know tricks like these are possible, and of course you can calculate your ETA, but I don't know when exactly a mission to Novosibirsk is counting as day or night. The thing is that changes to these would be QoL features, which was the thing that was asked. Generally speaking, in a strategy and/or tactics game, all of your actions should bear the meaning of your decisions, in contrast to just being performed because there is no easier way to do that. I do not desire calculating when I have to send my drop ship to do a mission as early as possible in day light and then click through the game speeds repeatedly. That is no meaningful action I am performing, and the game could do that for me. Instead, I could focus my mental capacity on more interesting and meaningful stuff. But maybe that is just me, being fond of turn-based tactics games and not so much of RTS where your reaction time and doing small work-like actions in split seconds matter for the outcome.

QoL: (preamble: I have no clue what can and cannot be modded in Xenonauts, I only know by now that everything is hard and that most issues I encounter are in the base game code and cannot be resolved. So I just assume everything I would want to see is not possible for X-Division) - more Information! Tactics and strategy games, especially if there is no time limit, should give you all the information you should have to play optimally. That does explicitly NOT include if your 43% shot will hit and how much damage it will do. Let me give an example: If I want to, I can calculate whether or not a soldier will be able to come out of cover, jump over a fence, shoot at an enemy twice and get back into some other cover. A novice player will have no clue whether that is possible, but he would play better if he had. So some kind of action planning tool would be great. Additionally, I miss the info about how many TUs it costs to reload my weapon while at the tactical layer. Access to the Xenopedia in GC could help a lot there, but we also know that the values and texts are not always correct. Also some radius telling me where the grenade I am about to throw might land if it is not a 100% throw, maybe even colour coded for likelihood. - production and logistics automation. I want to be able to order a Mk2 Laser Sniper Rifle in base A from base B, using their engineers, and possibly even resources lying around in base C, with a display how long and how many resources (of how many) and money this will take. The game should then transport the resources and the finished product for me and notify me of its arrival at the destination. - a timer on downed UFOs on how long they will last before they disappear and a warning at the last opportunity to send soldiers there. - a display whether or not you will have a night mission when your dropship arrives, and an option to wait until you have a day mission. - I play with overburdened soldiers every mission so I can bring spare supplies. Though this is pretty cheesy and likely not actually wanted, I want a one-click option to drop stuff from their backpack in some order (e.g. top left to bottom right) until the soldiers are no longer overburdened. - all kinds of warnings. E.g. a warning that you are sending out a dropship without the maximum amount of soldiers even though there are some more ready, a warning that you send out without a vehicle if you have one available, a warning that the soldier will not be able to re-load the weapon he is carrying, a warning that you equipped the wrong magazines for the weapon you are carrying (e.g. Division Mk1 sniper ammo on a Div Mk2 sniper rifle), a warning for sending out a soldier without armour even though you have more lying around, a warning that a soldier will not be able to reload a weapon he is about to take from the ground, a warning that your multiple screen long shot is likely to hit friendlies in the path, stuff like that. Ideally I would be able to toggle warnings on or off in the game options. - A replay system of the alien turn. My mind sometimes clicks to stand-by with elevator music once I pressed the "end turn" button and I sometimes miss stuff like in which direction the alien disappeared, where the shots out of the fog of war came from, what sound I heard off in the distance, ... In a turn-based game I should be able to see the enemy moves in a turn-based fashion also. - really really optional, but it could be cool to colour your soldiers so that team building could be made more easy. E.g. I might want to group up the rocket launcher carrier and the ammo mule. There are symbols for them, but nothing on the actual tactical map that helps me make decisions like that. - A button to make equipment on the ground better visible, maybe even telling me what exactly lies there, but at least highlight tiles that contain stuff. - Some info overlay for the world map, e.g. how many planes of which kind which base has, which base has available and ready drop ships, which base has unoccupied workers of some kind, ... - For flying planes or squadrons a radius of their operational range (fuel left until they have to head back). Could also be cool to be able to extend this range in a direction by letting them land in some other base with unoccupied hangars for re-fueling. - Not strictly QoL, but I want to be able to walk through civilians or at least to shove them around. It is kind of ridiculous that they can trap you in and you may have to stun or shoot them in order to get out again, or that they can camp on a tile where your supplies lie. - A standard way to organize my soldiers on the dropship. Before every mission, I have to check that the vehicle is in the front of the chinook and the shielders are guarding the doors. I'll expand on that if I can think of more stuff.

I'd think of something like off-balancing the unit, but I fail to find an eloquent word for that. It would however also hint at the temporal nature. @Charonwhat happens to shocked units that are then suppressed? From what you wrote I expect them to have half TUs next turn while not being able to reaction this turn, right (so, exactly the same as if shock had not applied)? What about Xenonauts becoming shocked by enemy fire?

I think the usefulness depends on how many shots it takes, on average, to kill an enemy with a shotgun and how many you need for the first point of damage. In phase one enemies go down very quickly to shotguns once their armour is degraded enough to penetrate, so the TU deduction would only matter in the small set of encounters when you already hurt the enemy with a shotgun without killing it. Later on this might be more useful against enemies with high HP and relatively low armour. How would you weigh TU deduction vs. damage done?

I nearly spat out my water on that one. Or, as a famous voice of Deus Ex would say "I spilled my drink!"

Are you now counting the versions in binary? Also, what does the mitigation to human stun gas mean, exactly?

@CharonI also was under the impression that there would be a likelihood of you incorporating @PALU's texts into the mod. Would it be much work to do so? I mean, he's written his ass off over the last couple of weeks, and I at least find his texts pretty compelling.

@PALU In the Ground Combat entry you have a typo: should be "flee". And the "a" between with and low should be deleted, methinks.

Wow, can't wait to play that. I guess I'll have to LP it after all...

Hey Charon, where can I find extensive info about the weapon modifier values for reflexes? The reflex and reaction shot system in general is clear, but there are questions I'd like to know the answers for like: What happens when both hands are full with different items/weapons? Which item determines the modifier? What is the modifier of "empty hand", of grenades, of medipacks, of alien weaponry etc?

The page looks great. Good luck on the campaign, Goldhawks!

Curse you, Drakon, my time was intended for answering the Real-time Geoscape thread, not your philosophical post, but you got me hooked here. I am very much on your side here. I also hope for a realistic, gritty game, even more so than the first Xenonauts was (though I liked its sober representation of what happened. Like the nuke on Terror Sites you could not handle, killing countless civilians). When I read about your super hero fantasy I immediately thought "Firaxis XCOM" even before you mentioned it. That's exactly the point. XCOM had so much potential, but in my opinion it wasted most of it for cool special abilities, effects and heroic pseudo-narrative, and with XCOM 2 and its Add-On they absolutely went down that rabbit hole. That said, I frankly do not expect Xenonauts 2 to be realistic. The whole premise of an alien invasion on earth is just so far from realistic that you can never build a realistic narrative on that. But what I want is a consequential world, following its own intrinsic logic. Xeno 1 did this in some aspects (like bleeding out of funds when neglecting countries), but not in others (the cold war it was set in was not really present just to mention one). From what I have read about how Xeno 2 is meant to be, I have doubts that Goldhawk are able or willing to really pull this through. And I don't really blame them; I know they are a small team and can't put weeks into features that are just there to fit the narrative. Plus, as a game designer you can't always sacrifice central game mechanisms for the sake of the integrity of the world you are building. For example, I'd love to see the bravery aspect of Xenonauts expanded into a full-blown psychology system with soldiers getting stressed out by the lovecraftian nature of the aliens, by comrades they lose or by civilians they accidentally (or even deliberately) kill, along with all the short and long term symptoms we know from wars like freezing in horror, stress induced blindness, uncontrolled violence, drug addictions, PTSD and so on. But I know this would likely take the game too far in a direction it is not meant to go. Soldiers, in the end, are your main tools to beat the game in tactical ground combat, and as such there has to be a line drawn somewhere. On the other hand I sometimes fail to see the benefit in systems Goldhawk propose that clearly do go against the narrative they want to create. One example for that would be the recently proposed ground interception teams consisting of soldiers to balance the fact that you only have one main base and the flight time might be too high. Instead of just tweaking the flight time so that we can theoretically reach everywhere in time, we will now split our small force prophylactically into even smaller teams, give them military grade weaponry and send them out into countries all around the world, while our operation is meant to stay covert, and a global crisis which we aim to prevent is smouldering, threatening to become explosive at any time. And we expect these countries with our soldiers in them not to react to unidentified, heavily armed combatants in their borders, and the lurking aliens to never find them even with their advanced technology. There are more aspects like this, but for the sake of brevity, and since everything could still change, I'll stop there. As for the hard decisions you mention, that would be awesome to see, but hard to implement, as Goldhawk is not a company that can afford to deliver a product you will only see a small portion of when playing once. Hardly any modern game ever takes that branching narrative approach and is successful with it. The Witcher 2 comes to my mind, but I can't think of any game like this in the tactics or strategy corner.

Swap them for their weapons. The soldiers need to have them in their hands. Once they do, they can use them on themselves or other humans (troops or civilians) in their immediate vicinity. I am not sure if unconsciousness of troops is a thing in vanilla, but if so, you can also wake troops up with medkits that way. Hint: It is more efficient to drop the weapon to the ground and then take the medkit in hands, as long as you plan on staying on that square.

Well, at least the finished interrogations are marked in your Xenopedia. That said I also have my list next to me when playing.

Ah yeah, forgot about that one. Then it really is not an issue (if it ever was one for anyone but me).

Yeah, but that ridiculous appearance is just because of the skew the Mercator projection introduces in flat maps, and because we are used to our flat maps. A correct radar coverage would mean thought that Canada and the USSR would not be as ridiculously hard to cover as they are in X1. Still hard, but not that badly. That's right for coverage. What about aircraft speeds and trajectories?

I do fully well realize that I am likely the only person obsessing over stuff like this, but can we please get a round earth for Xeno2? I don't necessarily mean in the actual visual representation, but in the mechanisms. It really annoys me somehow that, in X1, a base with a radar dish close to one of the poles covers way less "real" ground than it should, and aircraft and aliens fly slower there than at the equator.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but you can work around that. You can either spend their TU by turning them until below what they need to fire or just turn them with the back to the enemy so they don't see them. Also it's not that wise to put troops in front of your heavy gunners, but I know it can't always be helped.

Slightly off-topic here, but from a designer's POV it really goes to show that making your software easily expandable (or you could say "modable" in this case) is really hard and has loads of tiny pit falls like that one.

Hmm, that sucks. Well then your solution is the best one, I suppose, unless you want players to start at 0.5x speed and they'll never figure out that the air game actually is meant to be faster.

In principle pretty good, but the UI now is really inconsequential. What about increasing order but you start at item 3 (1.0x)?

Do you really expect a constructive answer on a post like that?

Just to elaborate a bit on my suggestion: This is more or less exactly what I thought of. In some window where you either spend some time waiting (geoscape in X1, loading screen) or where it thematically fits (barracks, base overview) you could add a scrolling (base internal) news feed the backers can participate in filling. But instead of having the news feed merely blare out the names of backers or their characters it would be some kind of text the backers chose. They could effortlessly get their name in there if they wanted. Fitting the theme these texts could be about outside world news ("Freak storm hits office building in Germany. Lone survivor Bruno D. claims 'ugly monsters made me go blind', not the lightning."), memorials ("Mass for deceased Sgt. Dagar today at 2 P.M. No open casket display (you would not want to see that)."), internal messages from staff (see my previous post), security messages ("Re-playing movie scenes of burglaries with laser rifles and bath room mirrors prohibited. You do not want to lose a toe like Sgt. Dagar."), other announcements ("Movie night starts at 8 P.M. Today's movie: Independence Day.) and so on. Of course you would have to approve these first. But this is easily implemented, can feature a vast amount of messages, is a nice thematic addition, and even if it is expandable by modders, the backer's message still would be in the vanilla game (and likely all mods to come). The downside would be that messages might not make sense at a certain point in the game (e.g. the above one if you have not researched laser rifles yet), so you'd either have to implement checks with the unlocks on the research tree or campaign progress or keep them so general that they could apply at any point in the game.